Wood and Coal Stove Advisory

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But in wood heat as in all else, you don't get something for nothing. Air-dried cordwood is about 20 percent water, which hot-burning conventional stoves evaporate and send up and out the flue. But with the colder-burning catalytics, the smoke is so cold that the water in it can condense before it exits the flue— to run out in black puddles over the cellar floor or freeze and break out the bottom of an exterior chimney. Also, the top-or rear-mounted combuster cell and its bulky housing limit design flexibility, so catalytics are blocky. Gone from the new stove shops are cylindrical railroad stoves, antique reproductions or long, angular log burners. Plus, catalytics are expensive.

Once, you could buy a mediocre-quality but workable Taiwanese copy of most any popular stove design for no more than $250. Now, you'll pay a minimum of $700 to over twice that for a catalytic; the EPA estimates that clean air adds $150 to $200 to the price. EPA testing, performed at five accredited labs across the nation, costs $4,000 to $5,000 (and up if re-testing is needed) per stove model and recertification is required every five years—which is affordable only for well-capitalized firms with a capable design staff, a solid product line, modern plant, and an effective marketing program. The number of manufacturers is down from 300 in the early '80s to about 100 firms producing some 400 EPA-certified models today. Among these are several long-established European stove manufacturers, but the Far Eastern makers of "toilets," as the trade refers to the cheap imports, are out of the business. So is their once-formidable downward influence on prices.

The diet of catalytics is restricted to wood—and nothing else. Just as a car's converter would be ruined by leaded gas, a wood-smoke combuster can be ruined if exposed to chemicals from coal, painted or treated wood, metals or plastics, and even some coated and colored papers. The EPA requires a full-replacement guarantee of two years on the combuster cell, and most manufacturers extend this on a "limited-warantee" basis to the cell's normal service life of five years or so. But the warrantee doesn't cover intentional damage from using your stove as a trash burner. A replacement cell costs $80 to $150.

Most discouraging perhaps, draft is restricted by the converter so that catalytic stoves perform at a technology-controlled pace. Starting up a fire with a cold flue can be troublesome, and catalytics burn wood deliberately—consuming about four loads of fuel in the time a non-catalytic would use six. So they produce correspondingly less heat than a conventional stove of the same size. Since the draft-restricting converter cannot be circumvented or legally removed for a quicker, hotter blaze, experienced woodburners installing a catalytic on the same scale as their familiar Mama Bear or Vigilant may find their homes cold and their stoves stubbornly unresponsive. "The thing is nothing but a damned appliance" says one owner of an early-model catalytic. "It won't heat or fire up like my old Wood Master." The manufacturers have improved catalytics' operating characteristics over the past five years, but many stove retailers are reluctant to sell an experienced woodburner a catalytic, and are recommending "high-tech" models.

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